33 Days to India By Camryn Clement

33 days.

Tonight's meeting was all about... you'll never guess... India!! We've been preparing for about 8 months now, fundraising like crazy, and are all so ready for November 17th to come. After submitting the last bits of our hard earned money, we were split off into boys and girls, and had separate meetings for the first while. We discussed how to stay safe while in these new places, and what we should do in order to not be obnoxiously loud Americans. After hearing some entertaining "don't be them" stories, we met up with the boys again for some great snacks.

Once we had replenished our starving bodies, and caught up with the latest Olympus High drama, we all took a seat to listen to Jake (Murrill) teach us the importance of personal hygiene, soap, and communication when it comes bodily functions. He and Allison both assured us that 1. Lice is a much less prominent issue than I had thought, and 2. TMI (too much information) doesn't apply when talking about sickness in India.

From here, we branched off into our village teams, and rechecked our duffel bags to make sure we had everything we needed to teach for seven days by unpacking almost everything before packing it right back up for India. Since Washington Elementary, everyone was feeling much more comfortable with the idea of sitting down with energetic little people to cram as much English as possible into their heads.

We moved onto our song and dance which we performed with so much energy that Allison passed it off on the first try. (For those of you who don't know, as much as Al loves us, she won't let us leave without a near perfect production of "baby" by Justin Bieber so this was nowhere near a small feat.) After our stellar performance, we gathered together for announcements, and received, courtesy of the design team, our swaggalicous sweatshirts, which showcased the art talent of Lizzy Reugner with the crazy cool elephant on the front. The back has all our names on it in the colors of the Indian flag, and the hood has our last name embroidered onto it so we can look dope and not mix them up.

We've got one more meeting at the dance studio and I can already tell it'll be a bittersweet goodbye to the building that was never a good temperature, but always a good time :')